Open Source Edition

Article 3. The Church, Mother and Teacher

2030

It is in the Church, in communion with all the baptized, that the Christian fulfills his vocation. From the Church he receives the Word of God containing the teachings of “the law of Christ.”1 From the Church he receives the grace of the sacraments that sustains him on the “way.” From the Church he learns the example of holiness and recognizes its model and source in the all-holy Virgin Mary; he discerns it in the authentic witness of those who live it; he discovers it in the spiritual tradition and long history of the saints who have gone before him and whom the liturgy celebrates in the rhythms of the sanctoral cycle.

2031

The moral life is spiritual worship. We “present (our) bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God”2, within the Body of Christ that we form and in communion with the offering of his Eucharist. In the liturgy and the celebration of the sacraments, prayer and teaching are conjoined with the grace of Christ to enlighten and nourish Christian activity. As does the whole of the Christian life, the moral life finds its source and summit in the Eucharistic sacrifice.

Subsections
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I. Moral Life and the Magisterium of the Church
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II. The Precepts of the Church
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III. Moral Life and Missionary Witness
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In Brief
Footnotes
  1. Gal 6:2.

  2. Rom 12:1.